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Harvard Book Store welcomes poets, critics, and scholars KRISTEN CASE and ALEXANDRA MANGLIS for a discussion of their new co-edited anthology, 21 | 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive. They will be joined by contributors and acclaimed poets BENJAMIN FRIEDLANDER, BRIAN TEARE and LEILA WILSON.

About 21 | 19

The nineteenth century is often viewed as a golden age of American literature, a historical moment when national identity was emergent and ideals such as freedom, democracy, and individual agency were promising, even if belied in reality by violence and hypocrisy. The writers of this “American Renaissance”—Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson, among many others—produced a body of work that has been both celebrated and contested by following generations.

As the twenty-first century unfolds in a United States characterized by deep divisions, diminished democracy, and dramatic transformation of identities, the co-editors of this singular book approached a dozen North American poets, asking them to engage with texts by their predecessors in a manner that avoids both aloofness from the past and too-easy elegy. The resulting essays dwell provocatively on the border between the lyrical and the scholarly, casting fresh critical light on the golden age of American literature and exploring a handful of texts not commonly included in its canon.

A polyvocal collection that reflects the complexity of the cross-temporal encounter it enacts, 21 | 19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.

Alexandra Manglis

Alexandra Manglis

Alexandra Manglis is a coeditor of 21 | 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive. She is also a writer and and cofounder of the experimental poetry magazine Wave Composition. Her work has appeared in The Millions, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Strange Horizons. She is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and holds a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford. She lives in Nicosia, Cyprus.

Photo credit: Orestis Lambrou

Benjamin Friedlander

Benjamin Friedlander

Benjamin Friedlander is the author of One Hundred Etudes (Edge Books) and Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (U of Alabama P), and editor of Robert Creeley's Selected Poems (U of California P). He teaches at the University of Maine.

Brian Teare

Brian Teare

Brian Teare is the author of six critically acclaimed books, most recently Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and Doomstead Days, out from Nightboat Books. His honors include the Brittingham Prize and Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, as well as fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. An Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Kristen Case

Kristen Case

Kristen Case is a coeditor of 21 | 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive. She is also the author of American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe, as well as two collections of poems, Little Arias and Principles of Economics. She is also coeditor of Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments and director of Thoreau’s Kalendar: A Digital Archive of the Phenological Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau. She teaches at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she is director of the New Commons Project.

Photo credit: Jaime Ranger

Leila Wilson

Leila Wilson

Leila Wilson is the author of The Hundred Grasses (Milkweed Editions), a finalist for the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She runs the Writing Center and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Harvard Book Store1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

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